It’s October, and that means it’s time for all things Pumpkin!
While I absolutely love summer, by the time October hits, I’m ready for some cooler weather and the beautiful colors of this season. It’s also when I finally get to break out my October Math and Literacy Centers. My kindergarten students just love these activities, and because of that I’m super excited to offer you these Pumpkin Rhyming Cards for FREE. You can grab them at the bottom of this post!
There are so many fun ways to use these cards. In fact, the FREE download includes a list of fun ideas.
If you’re looking for other fun pumpkin activities, be sure to check out my October Pumpkin Centers.
Here’s a glimpse of the few of the activities you’ll find inside.
Once we’re in October, we’ve spent a good amount of time working with letters and their sounds. While some students have mastered them, others are still working on it, and reviewing capital and lowercase letters is beneficial for all of them! These candy corn letter mats help students match the capital and lowercase letters, as well as pictures that begin with the letter sound. We’ve used it working with just a few letters at a time, as well as working with the whole alphabet. To give you fair warning, if you’re doing the entire alphabet, be sure to give your students plenty of space!
During the past few weeks, we’ve also been working on blending those letter sounds to build CVC words. And my students just love this Pumpkin Vine Word Family Center. The students match the picture on the pumpkin with the vine that has that word family label. While my students love that this is so interactive, I love that I can differentiate it easily. For some students I’ll say the name of the picture, and then they place it (and we only use 2 vines). Other students place all of the pumpkins on the different vines independently, and still others, place them on the vines and record the words on the recording sheet on their own! The students love it, and their learning so much!
We’ve also got some fun math activities.
My students love using these pumpkin counting cards. They count the number of seeds in the pumpkin, then count (and draw) on to reach the total. When you laminate these cards, kids can use them over and over!
And of course, we’ve got to have some puzzles. These pumpkin number puzzles help students match different representations of numbers. And….there’s so many ways to differentiate this activity! For students who are just beginning to recognize numbers, you could just give them 2-piece puzzles. For example, the pumpkin seed ten frames and the number. Other students may be ready for the three-part puzzle pictured below, which also includes base ten blocks. And, if you’ve got students who are really ready for a challenge, there’s also a blank puzzle piece where they can draw their own representation of that number!
And one of our all-time favorite activities this time of year is our candy corn measuring. Students use pieces of candy corn (or the candy corn rulers that are included) to measure different fall pictures. This is definitely a favorite math center activity – especially if I let them eat of couple of pieces of candy corn once they are finished.
There are even more activities included in this October center pack, so be sure to hop over to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store HERE to check it out!
And don’t forget to grab your free Pumpkin Rhyming Cards by clicking on the FREE button below:
